What’s up with NASA’s next moon rockets?

For the third part of my NASA trilogy (see earlier interviews with John Shannon, Space Shuttle program manager and Mike Suffredini, International Space Station program manager) I’ve posted a complete transcript of a recent interview I did with Jeff Hanley, manager of the Constellation Program.

NASA

Hanley

In many ways this this was the interview I was most interested in doing, because I know the least about Constellation, the program to build NASA’s next generation of rockets, and it’s also the most at risk during the Augustine Commission hearings.

Q. I recently spoke to John Shannon, who said of your program, “They have a good plan. Ares I is a good plan. Ares V is a good plan. Their architecture is good. They just are not funded. People say, ‘Ah they’re behind schedule,’ or ‘They have these technical difficulties.’ They don’t have money.” Is that the long and the short of it?

A. Yeah. The money profile I am working to today is dramatically different than the funding profile that was assumed in 2005 when this architecture study was done. Just through the end of next year I’ve lost a considerable amount of buying power. That’s the primary reason why we aren’t able to get Orion (crew carrying vehicle) flying before 2015.

Q. How is your funding profile different?

A. The funding has to be a total dollar amount, and it has to be provided in the right years. And it’s the funding in the right years that is the issue. Developmental programs like this have a characteristic shape to their funding curve year by year. And if you look at my funding curve it is not typical. It is very depressed in the early years, until after the shuttle is retired. That’s the situation that we find ourselves in.

Q. Tell me about the origins of the Constellation Program.

A. NASA has had both internal and external goals and recommendations made over the last 25 years to pursue a human exploration program beyond low-Earth orbit once again. We basically abdicated that capability, as a nation, after the Apollo Program. At least for a time. Constellation itself was largely borne out of the findings of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. In that report one of the things that it cites was the lack of an overarching long-term vision for human spaceflight as an ancillary cause of the environment that produced the accident. It also had several other findings related to what Constellation would become, mostly having to do with the safety of the vehicle we would design. That’s really where Constellation got its start.

Out of that the agency over the year or so after the accident worked with national leadership on formulating a long-term vision, and that was the vision that former President Bush brought forward in January 2004. That vision was then subsequently codified by Congress as the law of the land. So it wasn’t just Bush administration thing, it was the law of the land from first a Republican Congress and then a Democratic Congress, because there were two authorization bills. There was the NASA Authorization Act of 2005 and the NASA Authorization Act of 2008. Both of those authorization acts basically codified the vision to return humans to the moon, and create a launch system for astronauts to the space station after the shuttle was retired, and things like that. So that’s really where Constellation as a program was first thought of.

However it really wasn’t a full developed program until after the architecture study of 2005. At that point it had been about 15 months since the President’s announcement, so starting in April of 2005. This architecture study took 90 days, and basically collected together the work that had taken place over the last decade. It synthesized and made some choices about what the future of human spaceflight in America should look like. Those choices were then presented to the national leadership, they were accepted, and we moved forward. It was at the end of 2005 that I was brought on as program manager, and we set about establishing the program office.

Q. There’s been a lot of discussion about shaking with the Ares rockets. Is this potentially a show-stopper?

A. Every rocket shakes. Every rocket makes a lot of noise. Every rocket ever created has had to deal with some kind of vibration issue. In Apollo they had their version of this vibration issue, it was called Pogo at the time. They didn’t find that problem until the second test flight of the Saturn V, which is very late to be finding an issue like that. And it was much more severe than the issue Ares is facing. Ares’ problem is something we call thrust oscillation. It’s a characteristic of the solid motor. Fundamentally speaking all the solid motor is is a big metal tube with propellant lining the inside. The propellant burns from the inside out. This tube can act like an organ pipe. So if you get some kind of vibration of some piece that tunes up with the organ pipe, it’s that mode of the tube. There is some data on which we built our computer models from the history of space shuttle that suggests that can happen. What you want to make sure is that the rest of the stack, all the way up, doesn’t tune up with that vibration. If it tunes up the whole thing will shake. Ideally we want to separate the natural frequency from the rest of it, and we have plans to do that.

A. Well, we’ve instrumented the entire vehicle with over 700 pieces of instrumentation, and we will be monitoring for thrust oscillation. We’ve been measuring it on the last four shuttle flights on the shuttle rocket solid motors, and it hasn’t shown up. We don’t see it. It will only happen under certain conditions having to do with how the motor is made on the inside. It’s obviously a very random event and really of all the flight motors that have flown, it’s only shown up in a severe way in one. The rest of the times it has shown up is in motors that we’ve tested on the ground. We take the motor and we set it on its side, and we fire it sideways at a mountain in Utah. What we suspect is that maybe there’s some way the motor interacts with the test sand that is maybe amplifying the effect. But with a second set of springs or a damper inside the oxygen tank, either one will work, either one is going to solve the issue from a crew perspective. Now let’s make sure you understand what the problem was from a crew perspective. It wasn’t that the crew was going to get hurt. It was whether they were going to be able to read the control panel in front of them. Now if this thrust oscillation vibration does show up, it happens over a three to five second period at the very end of the solid motor burn. So this is a three- to five-second burn 115 seconds into the flight. And so what we’re trying to do is measure the extent to which that kind of upset to the crew, are they able to stay aware of what’s going on with the rocket and the spacecraft. That’s because, just after the solid separates away, and the upper stage engine lights, they want to be prepared to possibly take manual control.

Q. When the shuttle comes back through the sonic boom, during a landing, aren’t they shaking, rattling and rolling pretty good?

A. Oh yes. The shuttle shakes. Every rocket shakes. Watch Apollo 13. They simulate the launch of a Saturn V really quite accurately. And the crew is thrown around like crazy. I’m sure they weren’t keeping situational awareness through all of that. But this was a great concern to the crew office and we have devoted quite a bit of concern to giving them the kind of ride that will help them stay aware of what’s going on.

Q. So when do you think you’ll make the test flight?

A. Some time late September at best case, probably more like October.

Q. Ok, so you came on in late 2005.

A. Yes, it was me and a couple of staff people. We began working to where we were generating requirements for contractors. Then we take requirements and go get contracts. Over the last four years we’ve got five prime contracts amounting to billions of dollars to do the development of Ares I and Orion. And not just that, but convert the infrastructure at Kennedy Space Center to accommodate Ares and Orion, configure mission control here so that mission ops can be done, and build a new spacesuit, which we haven’t done in 30 years.

Q. So you’re almost four years on the job, and a new president comes in, sets up the Augustine commission, and during the first hearing everybody has an alternative, and thinks their idea is better than Constellation. Does it bother you to hear those kinds of things?

A. The uninformed criticisms, those bother me. But they’re just uninformed. And in fact, during our short amount of time at the public hearing we tried to dispel many of the myths out there about Constellation. I think the discourse is good. Certainly from a national policy perspective, it is perfectly understandable and probably highly warranted that the new administration, for themselves, come in and interrogate what we’re doing> Because they have to help us see it through. So they need to get convinced that we have a good plan, and that we’re capable of executing it. In a lot of ways I consider it an opportunity for us to educate and inform on the progress we’ve made in the last few years.

Q. But is it hard to work in an environment where everything you’re doing is under review and could be turned upside down in a few months?

A. Yeah, it’s not easy. I’ll grant you that. But we got very clear direction from the White House when they sanctioned the study that all ongoing work was to keep going. Dr. Holdren was very clear on that. It’s still not easy for my team to see all this going on, to read the blogs and all that, and yet carry on unaffected. But they do, because they’re NASA. They’re professionals.

Q. We’re near at the 40th anniversary of Apollo. Is this is a worthy successor?

A. You can probably look at Constellation as human space exploration version 3.0. Version 1.0 was Apollo, and by Apollo I include Mercury and Gemini. Version 2.0 is the space shuttle where the shuttle took a lot of what was learned in Apollo and applied in a new direction, to reusable earth-to-orbit transport. And it did an amazing job at it given the constraints they had in those days. Here we are now, 25 years later, and it’s time for the next generation. So we’re intent upon capitalizing on all those great advancements in the past, but improving upon them as well. So Constellation is sized not just to repeat Apollo, but to be able to go to the moon and other destinations, but our design focus has been the moon up until now, and be able to go anywhere with twice as many people, stay twice as long, and come home anytime to the hardest places to reach on the moon. Apollo was built to basically visit a narrow band around the equator of the moon. From a physics standpoint that’s the easiest region to reach. Ares V, the big rocket, the heavy lifter that we’ve envisioned, is more powerful and capable than the Saturn V. But you can see the lineage in the systems just by looking back to Apollo. That demonstrates that the physics hasn’t changed much over time. The gravity well is still the gravity well.

Q. Assuming you’re greenlighted, that the Augustine commission approves of what you’re doing, what do you see as the biggest challenge between now and getting Ares I flying humans into space?

A. You know we’ve been purposeful to embrace in both the rocket and the spacecraft the very best of the state-of-the-art, but not push the state-of-the-art that we were taking a lot of risks in order to be successful. So the greatest challenge I would say is a fiscal one. It’s back to the money. Will the money arrive in the years we need it. We get appropriated year-by-year, but we have these multi-year contracts. So that to me is probably the biggest challenge that we face.

Q. Finally, the International Space Station has been successful largely because it’s been an international effort. Constellation seems to be U.S. only.

A. That’s a perception I want us to change. We are deeply involved in discussions with our international partners about the lunar program. It’s true that we’re not building the big rocket with the partners. Although we’re not closed off from procuring parts from a foreign partner. But when we get to what we’re going to do on the surface of the moon, the original authorization acts talk about creating outposts on the moon. They even gave the outpost a name, the Neil Armstrong outpost or lunar base or whatever it was called. Congress actually gave it a name. But the infrastructure, the components we put down on the lunar surface for habitation, and power and communications and mobility to explore, all of that will be a multinational effort similar to the international space station. We started those discussions with our partners two years ago, and we have a global exploration strategy that we have formulated with them. And we’ve got all of the signatories from the international space station, and more, expressing interest. So this is an international program.

10 Responses

I an glad to hear about the “international cooperation” part. We better get a lot more cooperation going internationally or our longer term survival certainly quality of life here on Earth is not a good bet.

Great interview Eric! I was wondering what exactly does the first test flight entail? Are they talking about bringing the Orion capsule to a high altitude via a plane and dropping it or it will be a test including the rocket with capsule?

Interesting interview but the questions seemed to be designed to be easy to answer. Did you consider asking about the history of large projects and their inevitable cost growth? And how Jeff might have started out and tried to control that? But instead he made the situation worse. Most big programs adjust project goals to have an 85% confidence of making the dates – but wasn’t Constellation done at 65%? Didn’t Jeff have some input on that? Wouldn’t a reasonable project manager schedule goals based on funding? And not ask his team to meet unreasonable schedules? Or the design could have been set based on reasonable funding – and so people would not go out and design a big vehicle when they would inevitably have to cut it back and adapt to having a small, less capable vehicle?

Part of the problem has been that promised funding was not delivered. But a reasonable manager would have looked at our history and realized that the funding was not going to be there, and made adjustments.

A reasonable manager would have also not implemented the nano-management that NASA is famous for. But Jeff is the product of that same environment.

Anyway, I’d like to see that same interview as done by a reporter who was not so concerned with maintaining good access – and so accepts vague answers.

despite, Neil Armstrong, was/is one of my myths from when I was young (but not the main reason of my interest on Space since I was a Space enthusiast well before his moon walking) I believe isn’t correct to give only his name to the first lunar outpost

there are other choices that are more correct to name it:

- to J.F. Kennedy that decided to go to the Moon

- to von Braun whose scientific genius made it possible

- to the Apollo 1 crew that gave their lives for the project

- to the Apollo 11 crew that (all them) have accomplished the successful mission

- or (simply) call it the “Apollo Lunar Outpost” to include everything and everybody worked in this incredible adventure!

ps – however (if you want to be a bit ironic…) build the first lunar outpost in the Tranquility Sea, near the Apollo 11 relics, and call it “The Conspiracy Theorists Lunar Outpost”…

I did not agree with Mr. Hanley (and he didn’t tell the true story about Constellation, ESAS, Ares, etc.)

I can say that, since the Bush’s VSE plan was very interesting, so, I’ve followed its story and its evolution from the end of 2005 (and I’ve written several articles on my website and blog and literally DOZENS threads and THOUSANDS posts and comments on several space forums and blogs in last four years)

first of all, his claims about the lack of funds is a complete nonsense!

a project can’t be “indefinitely funded” but must be only “reasonably funded”

if you are bored to see the Sun to rise from East… and its sunset to West… you can ask NASA to stop the Earth, then, start run again the Planet in the opposite direction … but it will cost you One Million of Trillions of Dollars …

when they released the ESAS plan in 2005, they have claimed and PROMISED to use only true-shuttle-derived hardware (mainly the standard SRB and the SSME) in order to accomplish the plan, saving time and money

in 2005, they have evaluated the costs around $5 Bn for the Ares-1, $5 Bn for the Orion and around $5-10 Bn fr the Ares-5

well, although these costs already was very high (in late 2005, posting on uplink.space, I’ve evaluated the Orion/Ares-1 launch costs between $1-2 Bn EACH and, the early 12 Moon missions planned in 2020-2025, around $8-12 Bn, each!) they have quickly changed in 2006 all their designs and plans starting the current big delays, space flights gap and costs overrun